Pages

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Thoughtful . . . About Optimism

I confess. I'm an optimist. Not just a fleeting optimist, mind you, an eternal one. As the hero in my Work In Progress just said to the heroine, "You go way beyond optimist. You don’t just see the glass half full–even when it’s empty, you say, ‘Yay! Now I get to fill it up with something even better!’” That, as my husband and critique partners will tell you, is the perfect description of me.

It's gotten to the point where it's a joke. If someone else is called an optimist, they'll reply, "Oh, I've got nothing. You should meet Roseanna." Seriously. When the Lord was writing genetic code, he gave all the worry genes to my sister and left me with this attitude of "all's well until you prove me otherwise. And even then I won't be convinced for long!"

Amid my critique group, the joke has led to a new name. I said something about optimism being my middle name. Carole Brown replied with "Are you sure it's not your first?" LOL. We all decided that maybe it was hyphenated–Roseanna-Optimist.

I now sign all critique emails with RO, the agreed-upon abbreviation. And it suits me so well that I almost always start to sign ACFW emails that way, too. And HisWriter emails. And every other email.

Sometimes I wish I weren't always so hopeful, since things rarely go as well as I think they will. But in general, this is a really handy attitude to have in the publishing industry. Whenever I get a rejection (not that I ever get rejections, ha ha ha), I usually reply with, "Oh well. There must be a better contract out there for me!" Of course, my wonderful agent then has to try to find it, LOL. She said a few months back, "You're always so cheerful! I hate giving you bad news. I want to sell something for you!"